The disclosure relates in general to backup and restore of databases and more specifically to customizing backup and restore of databases.
Databases are often used to store data used by an enterprise. In case of disasters, the database may lose information that is critical to the enterprise. For example, the hard disk on which the database is stored may get corrupted and become unreadable. The data loss can also occur due to human error. For example, a system administrator may perform an operation that either deletes or updates data incorrectly.
Databases typically allow the data stored in the database to be backed up. Furthermore, the database can be restored from a backup of the database. Backups are periodically performed in databases that are constantly updated. In case the database becomes corrupt or there is loss of data for some reason, an earlier version of the database can be restored provided the database was backed up.
However, databases used by several applications can be so large that taking backups and restore can require very large amount of storage and takes very long time to process. As a result, backups of these large databases may not be performed very frequently by system administrators. If database backups are not performed frequently, a restored database may have a much older version of data compared to the data that was lost and significant amount of information may be lost upon restore. As a result conventional backup and restore techniques are incapable of handling the sizes of data encountered in several databases.